Dilberito

From Business Week’s Top Products of 2000:
“Scott Adams, the famed Dilbert cartoonist, pined for a convenient vegetarian meal. The result: the Dilberito, a tasty $2.70 meatless burrito fortified with 23 vitamins and minerals.”

The Dilberito is currently out-of-production; however, as a commodity depicts the essential attributes of the post-Fordist imformation economy and its tendency towards mediocrity in both the products of labor and labor itself. With the mantra “We Make it Easy to Eat,” Scott Adams Food, Inc. condenses the gastronomy, convenience, and economy (the would-be price in 2008, adjusted to inflation, is $3.31) into one object, eliminating the need for contemplation and decision. At the same time it demonstrates modernity’s greater tendency toward integration and rapidization of life. In addition to conforming to ‘vegan’ dietary guidelines, the Dilberito also manages to engage a cross-continental and cosmopolitan culinary discourse as it is offered in Mexican, Indian, Barbeque, and Garlic & Herb varieties. It is perfect for the on-the-go intellectual laborer. In a similar fashion of biometric engineering that brought about Frederick Winslow Taylor's 21-pound shovel, its familiar ‘hand held’ size makes it tactilely uniform to other monodigital accessories of the page-a-day laborer: the iPod, cell (i)phone, pager, the mouse, the Palm Pilot, and, during free-time the universal remote control.

When Anson Rabinbach writes on the personal productivity of the worker he subjects nutrition to his historical analysis of how the flow of energy was most effectively harnessed to produce surplus-value. As a “subjective aspect of labor power,” diet and nutrition contribute to a general “lessening of fatigue and the improvement of the social milieu in which the work was accomplished.” (Rabinbach 217) As labor became increasingly rationalized during the 19th century, during which also occured the rise of bureaucracy and the bureaucratic class, the energetic intake of the worker (measured in calories) became important in determining how energy moved through various inputs to produce desired outputs. In this period of heightened attention to the measurability of the worker, calories meant more than the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1g of water by 1°C; caloric intake by the laboring body became just another factor in the equation that translated quantities of energy into Capital.

In the late 19th century physiologist Armand Gautier believe that he could determine “the minimum number of calories necessary to power a worker or soldier at different tasks.” (Rabinbach 130) The Dilberito expresses the success of this project; as an object of potential nutritional it is designed to provide the precise amount of energetic stimulation to drive a non-laboring (non-manual) labor army. The replacing of meat protein with synthetically derived '23 vitamins and minerals' provides the bare means-of-subsistence for the paper pushing intellectual while at the same time illustrating. As a source of caloric energy and ‘nutrition’ it can be put in terms of the reproduction of the worker, the maintenance of the means of production, and therefore as a means of relative surplus-value extraction.

The $3.31 does not stop here— the Dilberito’s capacity to exponentially increase surplus value extraction operates on an absolute level as well. If we are to take Adorno and Horkheimer seriously and believe that the worker always works two jobs—that of both producer and consumer—we find that the Dilberito has an ideological function to facilitate the extraction of surplus-value absolutely. Aside from assimilating the nutrients embedded in the formal properties of the food, the consumer assimilates himself qua-worker via the Dilberito as self-reflective cultural object. Thus, in addition to consuming caloric energy, the Dilberarian is reifeing their own non-class-consciousness and producing themselves during consumptive time while consuming himself during productive time. The spheres of production and consumption overlap in such a way that they collapse the temporal distinction that Adorno and Horkheimer posit. The energy supplied by the Dilberito that allows the managerial-class to carry on in a dreamlike daze throughout the workday proper permits the same continuous participation in cultural products on both company-time and free-time.


Despite its orientation towards efficiency and rationality it does not eliminate food’s quality of pleasure and enjoyment. When asked “Why Dilberito?,” Adams responded and at the same time gave a lucid ethical truth: “I knew that we could do something to make the world a better place, and make some money in the process. It's called enlightened capitalism.”

He [Adams] did not know to what extent he was right.

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